9/11 allegations press on Rice from all sides

The US national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was due to deliver a national security speech on September 11 2001 that dwelt not on terrorism but on the proposed Star Wars missile defence system.

Details of the speech, coupled with fresh allegations that the Bush administration knew of plans to attack the US, piled the pressure on the beleaguered Ms Rice last night, as it was announced that she would testify under oath and in public next Thursday.

A former FBI translator who gave testimony to the commission investigating US preparedness for the September 11 terror attacks said the US should have had an "orange or red type of alert in June or July of 2001. There was that much information available".

Sibel Edmonds, who worked on the FBI's investigation into 9/11, told the online magazine salon.com: "President Bush said they had no specific information about September 11, and that's accurate.

"But there was specific information about use of airplanes, that an attack was on the way two or three months beforehand and that several people were already in the country by May of 2001. They should've alerted the people to the threat we're facing."

Ms Edmonds, an American of Turkish descent who speaks fluent Farsi, Arabic and Turkish, gave three and a half hours of testimony in closed session last week.

She also took issue with recent assertions by Ms Rice that the White House lacked information about the possible nature of an attack. "That's an outrageous lie," she said. "And documents can prove it's a lie."

The White House has con firmed the existence of the draft of Ms Rice's speech from September 11, first reported by the Washington Post, but refused to release the full text.

A spokesman said that one speech focusing on missile defence did not mean the White House was ignoring the terrorist threat.

But details of the draft have quickly become ammunition in the bitter election-year fight over whether the Bush administration took al-Qaida seriously enough before the 2001 attacks.

After a constitutional tussle, the White House reluctantly agreed last week to allow Ms Rice to give sworn public testimony to the commission. She will almost certainly be questioned about the speech.

"She's obviously a very important witness who will be able to share the facts that pertain to the counter-terrorism policy in the Bush administration, particularly in its earliest months," commission spokesman Al Felzenberg told the Associated Press last night.

The address, which was to have been given at a university in Washington, adds weight to allegations in a book by a former White House counter-terrorism expert, Richard Clarke, that the incoming administration was fixated on Iraq and issues inherited from the cold war such as missile defence and relations with China and Russia in the critical months before al-Qaida's attacks.

The draft mentions terrorism, but only in the context of the threat posed by "rogue states" armed with weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. Neither the September 11 text nor any other Bush administration speech from that era mentions al-Qaida or Osama bin Laden.

The Rice speech argued for the need to confront "the
threats and problems of today and the day after, not the world of yesterday", and then went on implicitly to criticise the Clinton administration's preoccupation with terrorist groups at the expense of building defences against ballistic missiles.

"We need to worry about the suitcase bomb, the car bomb and the vial of sarin released
in the subway," the text of the speech argues, according to the Washington Post.

"[But] why put deadbolt locks on your doors and stock up on cans of Mace and then decide to leave your windows open?"

Scott McClellan, chief White House spokesman, shrugged off calls for the text of the Rice speech to be published, argu ing that it was not delivered and therefore not in the public domain.

He added that missile defence and counter-terrorism were not "either-or choices".

"We must act on all fronts to make America safer. These threats are not mutually exclusive, either. Confronting one helps address the other," he said.

Ivo Daalder, a member of the national security council staff under President Clinton, argued that senior officials in the Bush White House took office with the same foreign policy concerns and outlook they had had eight years earlier working for the first President Bush.

"When they left in January 1993, they hit the pause button. The intervening eight
years were missing," said Mr Daalder, who is now a foreign policy analyst at the Brookings Institution.

"They left believing ballistic missile defence was the way to secure America, and came in believing ballistic missile defence was the best way to secure America."

guardian.co.uk/september11

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